The liberal/socialist dichotomy can't be applied fruitfully to China. It's a nation with a DOTP, led by the CPC, with an economy that is being constructed in a socialist way, that is China has capitalist dictatorship over large swathes of the means of production, and the CPC and ergo the proletariat are engaging in protracted class warfare with targeted nationalizations after an industry reaches the form of monopoly or a focus on infinite growth. This is why Chinese Marxists call it socialist construction rather than admitting to having achieved a socialist society. SOEs and private capital are battling for supremacy, and the CPC is utilizing those private industries to achieve national growth and national rejuvenation -- letting their productive forces reach their limits prior to the stage of engaging in imperial extraction -- and then socializing them.

There are sectors of China, namely the capitalists and rightists, that are attempting to steer China in the direction of infinite growth, monopoly, and imperialism. The CPC, and the political dictatorship of the proletariat, are there to struggle fiercely against them and socialize their resources whenever they have reached the highest stage of production they can vis a vi capitalist control. It's disingenous to suggest that China's economy is necessarily socialist or capitalist or liberal or whatever, its economy is a battlefield where class war is constantly being waged through nationalizations, asset seizures, executions, state-supported workers' movements and protests, etc. Dialectics are at play here, with capitalism and socialism struggling for supremacy. Under the leadership of the CPC, socialism is winning, albeit perhaps more slowly than some would like.